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SpaceX's Latest Launch Successful, But Ends With a "Hard Landing" (theverge.com)
Eloking writes with this news from The Verge: SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space this afternoon, but — as expected — failed to land the vehicle on a drone ship at sea afterward. CEO Elon Musk said the rocket 'landed hard' on the drone ship. The mission requirements made a successful landing unlikely. This was SpaceX's fourth attempt to land the Falcon 9 post-launch on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. All of the previous sea landings failed too, though the third attempt came very close. The company had low hopes of a successful landing from the start of this mission, since the rocket had to send a heavy satellite into a high orbit. That requires a lot of fuel for the launch itself, so there wasn't much fuel left for the rocket's return to Earth and powered landing.
Right, successfully inserting a communications satellite into geostationary orbit, exactly as contracted to do... Such a fuck up.
Are there still people here who don't know the difference between an orbital and a suborbital rocket? I thought we were past that.
AmiMoJo: the difference between landing a suborbital rocket and landing an orbital rocket is the difference between jumping off your couch and landing on your feet without falling over, and jumping off a ladder and landing on a pogo stick without falling over.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Well, I think part of his argument is that they aren't doing it. How many successful landings have they had on their barge?
How many successful landings has anybody had from landing a 5 story tall launch vehicle above the Karman Line (aka what is commonly thought of as actually outer space) and then landing that rocket on a barge in the ocean?
I think the level of expectation here is just a tad bit high, where even the notion of calling this a failure is simply absurd.
Very useful engineering data was obtained on this flight, including in the landing. For a rocket that wasn't expected to be recovered at all in this particular case, SpaceX did a pretty good job at trying to recover it, and got some pieces anyway as it actually did land on the barge.... just not as slowly as necessary to get it in one piece.